Transport: Bus Services

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Bradshaw]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to increase the use and quality of bus services.

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their magnificent punctuality, which should be the precursor of this debate. It is my great pleasure to welcome my noble friend Lady Kramer as the Minister. I am sure that her advent here will be warmly welcomed throughout the House. It is also a good thing to note that the Department for Transport has today issued a statement about the Better Bus Area Fund, with new additions to it in Merseyside, York, Nottingham and the west of England. This money has been competed for and is to go towards improving bus services according to those proposals put forward by authorities which were deemed to be the best.

I shall start by talking about the reimbursement of concessionary fares. This is still a bone of contention. I remember when the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, was the Secretary of State, he invited a party of bus operators to see him. We had a full and frank discussion, but unfortunately it did not actually result in anything. The consequence is that there is a lot of ill feeling among bus operators that they are not getting a fair return for the services rendered. They should be neither any better off nor any worse off, but some of them are in fact considerably worse off. Unfortunately, that disadvantage is felt most severely by small and medium-sized operators, not the big five. They have the opportunity to cross-subsidise and utilise the swings and roundabouts. However, I have received a letter from a bus operator in Norfolk who is quite adamant that his operation is not getting adequate reimbursement. The letter states, “Certainly in my area, now with the highest proportion of over-60s among its population of anywhere in England, there are longer routes where the scheme comprehensively underpays any reimbursement, and this is causing services to be reduced or cut entirely”. I think that we are all conscious of the fact that it is not fair or reasonable to offer elderly people bus passes on the one hand and to remove their bus services on the other.

I want to ask the Minister whether she will take another look at what is going on and possibly meet with some more bus operators with, I hope, a better result than was the case after my last meeting. This is an important issue. I know that all the political parties are gearing themselves up to offer, at the next general election, to do something about young people’s fares. There is much justice in that, particularly following the raising of the school leaving age and so on. However, bus operators will not co-operate unless they feel that they are being treated fairly in respect of concessionary fares. Again, it is important that something is done about this because we should be reaching out to people when they reach the age when they can buy motor cars. It is rather important that they do not buy them because of the congestion that affects many of our towns and cities. This is the first issue I want to bring home, and I hope that the Minister will agree that we should have some discussions with operators.

The second issue that I wish to debate is profitability. The word “profit” has been bandied about recently as a thoroughly dirty word, yet any enterprise that is progressive needs profit to invest money. The bus companies have not been slow to invest money. They have much more modern, environmentally friendly and cleaner vehicles than they had a few years ago, which—thinking of the next debate—cannot be said of all train operators. However, some people are now describing “profit” as a dirty word.

I have been involved in the management of bus companies. I know that bus companies in both the public and private sectors have to earn a profit, otherwise they will not have money to invest. Where profits are at a reasonable level and companies are investing money, we should not pretend that allowing the public sector to take over the routes, which was more or less set out by Maria Eagle at the Labour Party conference, is a way forward at all. Reducing the bus operators to penury is not a very good policy. I can remember—because I am very old—what Greater Manchester buses were like when they were in public ownership. The buses ran late; they were filthy-dirty; the staff were thoroughly disobliging; and the service cost the ratepayers a lot of money.

We know that the authority in Tyne & Wear, for example, is trying to go forward with a quality contract scheme. The arithmetic of it seems to be very faulty. I know that there is a procedure that has to be gone through to convince the senior traffic commissioner that a scheme is good and will benefit taxpayers and bus users. The Government should be very careful that they get good, sound reasons for any change that takes place. I fancy that it will be a long struggle. The bus companies believe that their rights are being sequestrated without compensation, and the likelihood is that the case will go right to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if the scheme is not properly formulated.

Competition is necessary, but all attempts to regulate it through competition authorities have proved very expensive and ineffective. If the Minister looks back through the records of the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission, she will see that they investigated the bus industry probably more than all the other industries in the country put together. It cost a huge amount of money and took up a huge amount of management time, and I do not think that any result was worth a row of beans.

Could not the traffic commissioners have a more active role in regulating any predatory behaviour that arises? The commissioners have to accept a registration. Before they accept that registration, they will know that Bill Bloggs proposes to run a bus three minutes in front of Bill Smith’s, after which there will be a long gap. That sort of thing does not need a genius to spot, and is extremely destructive of the network and public confidence.

Local government has a very active role in keeping streets clear of obstructions, be they parked cars or road works which seem to infest all our roads. I believe that when a traffic commissioner calls in a bus operator for not operating within the margins—margins which are going to be tightened up to mean no minutes early and nearly 100% on time, which is a very high target—the traffic commissioner should also summon the local authority at the same time to make sure that it is playing its part in the bargain because, unlike with the railway, the streets are separate from the operator. At least with the railway they fall within one armful with the Office of Rail Regulation.

There are a few things that might interest the Minister and I would be very happy to talk in more detail. This is the time of year when I raise the question of the bus industry which needs consideration.